I didn't plan this life.
For years, my identity was built around one thing: being a police officer. I showed up for people on the worst days of their lives. I ran toward the things most people run away from. My whole sense of who I was lived inside that badge.
In June of 2022, that ended in about ten seconds.
I responded to a call involving an unresponsive person in a vehicle. I made the call any officer would make — I broke the window to get to them. My dominant hand and wrist took the damage instead. The injury was severe enough that I lost feeling in my hand permanently. The career I had built my entire adult life around was gone, just like that. Not a slow fade. A hard stop.
If that had been the only thing happening, it would have been enough to knock me sideways. It wasn't the only thing. Around the same time, my marriage ended. The future I thought I was building — the one with a clear shape, a clear title, a clear next ten years — didn't exist anymore.
I want to be honest about something: I didn't handle it gracefully. Nobody hands you a manual for "your career is over and your marriage is over and also your dominant hand doesn't work right anymore, good luck." I was forced to rebuild. Not because I had some inspiring epiphany. Because I didn't have a choice.
The candles were never supposed to be a business
I needed something to do with my hands and my brain that wasn't sitting in the wreckage of what my life used to look like. So I started making candles in my basement, in what used to be a spare bedroom — the same room that's now my workshop.
I want to be really clear about this part, because it gets romanticized in a lot of "girlboss origin story" content and I hate that: it was not strategic. I was not thinking about margins or wholesale accounts. I was thinking about getting through the next hour. Melting wax, measuring fragrance, pouring it into a jar — it gave me something a lot of things had just taken away from me: a small amount of control.
It turned out that focus was its own kind of medicine. Not a metaphor. An actual, physical redirection of a mind that badly needed somewhere to go besides backward.
Somewhere along the way, it became something else
I started showing up to markets. Then more markets. Somewhere past a hundred, I stopped counting exactly how many — it's over 500 now. People didn't just buy the candles. They asked about my hand. They asked what happened. And when I told them, a lot of them told me their own version of the same story back — a divorce, a burnout, a diagnosis, a layoff, a version of their life that didn't go according to plan either.
That's when I understood what I was actually building. Not a candle company. A place for people who were rebuilding something, too.
Pearl & Company grew from there — real customers, real markets, workshops where people showed up not really for the craft but for the excuse to breathe for two hours. Wholesale accounts. A six-figure business I built with a hand that still doesn't fully work right, alongside a Great Pyrenees named Pearl who was there for every hard year and now gets credit as our unofficial CEO, because she earned it more than I did some days.
What I actually want you to take from this
I'm not going to tell you everything happens for a reason. I don't believe that, and I don't think you need someone to tell you that in order to keep going.
What I believe is this: you can lose the thing you built your whole identity around, and it does not mean you're finished. It means you're being handed a different set of materials to work with. Some of them will feel like garbage at first. Mine did. A broken wrist and a broken marriage did not feel like the start of anything good.
But four years later, I run a business that has helped thousands of people find five quiet minutes in a hard day. I did not plan that. I built it out of what was left when the plan fell apart.
If you're in the middle of your own rebuild right now — whatever version of a broken window you're dealing with — I hope you know you're allowed to start over quietly. You don't need a five-year plan. You just need the next small thing to build with your hands.
For me, that was wax and a wick. I hope you find yours.